In this post, I would like to show a very simple, yet a very effective principle that is present in every game of chess.

While our opponent’s moves are providing vital information about their intentions, still we often fail to understand them in their entirety. By entirety, I mean not only understanding their intention, but also their drawbacks.

Playing in chess tournaments is a completely different thing from studying chess or playing friendly casual games at the club with your pals. While we can do pretty well during our lessons, training sessions with friends or coach, an official competition forces you to make your best effort and put to work your best competitive skills and character. Of course, usually there are hundreds of other colleagues doing exactly the same and as if this didn’t sound hard enough there is the time pressure.

“I can’t play this move because my opponent can capture it” – How many times have you heard a chess player say this? How many times have you said it yourself? There are many positions where we believe a move is not possible by default though. Our subconscious tells us that it is not possible to move to a specific square because our opponent is defending it with more than one piece or more than one pawn.

One of the most important tasks every chess player needs to do in order to improve his level is to analyze carefully his own games, regardless of the result. Analyzing your own games has existed since forever. Mikhail Botvinnik was one of the most notable world champions to recommend this practice as the essence of chess improvement. If we look back to the days when it was possible to adjourn games, chess players spent nights and days analyzing a position.

One of the most difficult things to measure in chess is progress. No matter how much you train at home, how confident you are or how many blitz games you win online it is the tournaments that will put a note on your efforts. As explained in several previous articles, improvement relies on many different qualities, not only on well-sharpened skills but also on a strong mind, capable of overcoming any difficult situation that may arise. It is hard to imagine that one can achieve success at a tournament without having previously worked hard in a consistent way.

Quite often after a serious amount of time of regular training sessions, some people still struggle to show better results at tournament practice. How is it possible, one may think, after studying so much to still perform poor and sometimes even worse than before training periodically? It can sound strange but this scenario is not rare at all. Chess is a complex game and the victory lies in many factors; some can be trained and others you only learn how to deal with when you grow a more mature mindset.

Time trouble is a common thing in chess practice. No matter how strong a player becomes, the difficulty of the game increases as time starts ticking low. For some players it is even a chronic defect; they always get in time trouble and then they become used to responding under time pressure.

That being said, it is not the case for the majority of people. Usually poor time management comes from poor decisions on earlier phases of the game.

The ability to calculate is crucial in every chess player’s journey to improvement. There’s no such thing as a completely positional game where no calculation is needed; no matter how calm and quiet things have been going, there’s always a moment where you’ll need to see more than your opponent.

It is common knowledge that the key to making progress in chess is the consistent and deep analysis of your own games. Once you have learned the most typical nuances of positional play and tactics, it is worth finding out what you miss in your own practice. It is necessary to try to get to the source of your mistakes and learn more about your own strengths and weaknesses.